Electronic mail (email) has become a very important means of communication. Users of email may have one or more mailboxes that they may need to access from a variety of devices or systems and a variety of locations. Various services may also access the mailboxes. For example, some services provide a unified mailbox that allows the user to access one or more mailboxes through the unified mailbox.
Services such as Yahoo™ now provide mailbox services that automatically poll a predefined list of mailboxes to determine if new email has been received. New emails that have been received in any of the polled mailboxes are retrieved into the requesting mailbox. As a result, the user only has to check the requesting mailbox to determine if new email has arrived in any of the other mailboxes. This reduces the number of mailboxes that are required to be checked periodically. Other services allow a user to access their mailboxes through a plurality of devices such as, but not limited to, mobile phones, mobile computing devices, for example, personal digital assistants (POA's) and other communications devices.
In order to access a mailbox, a valid set of configuration parameters must be specified. An essential parameter is the mailbox protocol through which access to the mailbox is achieved, since there are many different mailbox protocols in existence, such as Post Office Protocol (POP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Other parameters might include a mailbox server name or a mailbox login name. Each unique combination of these parameters defines a different configuration that can be used to access the mailbox. In some cases, there are multiple unique configurations that can be used to specify access to a single mailbox, whereas in other cases, only one specific configuration can be used. Typically, the user would have to determine these configuration parameters for each of the mailboxes and configure manually a web service associated with a web server to access each of the mailboxes.
One proposal in U.S. patent application publication No. 2002/0174194 provides a single web-based interface that gives the user access to a plurality of different message accounts on different message servers. This proposal allows email clients to access only a subset, namely messaging, of an IMAP server, and requires a user to establish all configuration parameters for the IMAP server functionality. Other similar proposals that require a user to determine and manually configure a web service for configuration parameters are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,968,117 and U.S. published patent application No. 2002/0112007, where message sources are established during setup and a technical support can be called. U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,114 discloses the use of an agent that searches a user database to determine a list of messaging systems the user subscribes. The agent recalls from an application database any procedures for accessing the messaging systems and logs onto each messaging system to retrieve new messages.
These various services that access the user's mailboxes require configuration parameters, such as a mail host and a protocol, to access the mailbox. The vast majority of users only know their email address and password, and do not know the values of the remaining configuration parameters. If all the configuration parameters had to be specified by the user, and the user was unable to provide the configuration parameters, the web service would not be able to access the user's mailboxes and the user would be denied the service. As a result, it is important that the configuration parameters for the user's mailboxes be determined based on the limited information that the user is able to provide to the email provider or other service.